you blog: tweets

atomic energy can be used for good (energy) or for bad (war),

Thus, the emergence of peer to peer as a phenomena spanning the whole social field is not ‘caused’ by technology; it is rather the opposite, the technology reflects a new way of being and feeling,

Society is not just a physical arrangement, or a rational-functional arrangement, but everything is experienced symbolically and reflects a meaning that cannot be reduced to the real or the rational. It is the product of a 'radical social imaginary'.

In this context, peer to peer is the product of a newly arising radical social imaginary. Nevertheless, this does not mean that technology is not an important factor.

he development of P2P technology is an extraordinary vector for its generalization as a social practice, beyond the limitations of time and space, i.e. geographically bounded small bands. What we now have for the first time is a densely interconnected network of affinity-based P2P networks. Thus, the technological format that is now becoming dominant, is an essential part of a new feedback loop, which strengthens the emergence of P2P to a degree not seen since the demise of tribal civilization. It is in this particular way that the current forms of P2P are a historical novelty, and not simply a repeat of the tolerated forms of egalitarian participation in essentially hierarchical and authoritarian social orders.

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/podcast-of-the-day-remixing-the-commons/2014/07/04

Can I borrow a pencil? #edchat #moedchat #unionrxi http://t.co/aYKRX0WCGe

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/justintarte/status/485424272907595776

Why is this nonprofit promoting false research on US poverty and literacy? https://t.co/4uHHJrpiXL I really wonder what the game is

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/irasocol/status/485749017507164160

Ira Socol @irasocol

Why is this nonprofit promoting false research on US poverty and literacy? dosomething.org/facts/11-facts… I really wonder what the game is

Details Open

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sandymaxey @sandymaxey

@irasocol Follow the money. Sounds like the folks who are attempting to turn public edu into charter schools.

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Ira Socol @irasocol

@sandymaxey that's my assumption.  Almost every statement on that site is completely false

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sandymaxey @sandymaxey

@irasocol Remarkably similar to the message being splattered throughout NC now, thanks to ALEC.

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Ira Socol@irasocol

@sandymaxey this is how the right wing uses colonialist neoliberalism to seduce wealthy college students

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/world/asia/an-online-shift-in-china-muffles-an-open-forum.html?_r=1&utm_content=buffer31b08&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I Was So Right About Distraction in Now You See it: Darn it all! | HASTAC http://t.co/OpgsqB0LZo

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/CathyNDavidson/status/485517540051791872

Great exploration by neuroscientist of secrets of the creative brain including higher propensity for mental illnesshttp://t.co/qhMguwlUk2

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/jhagel/status/485838471613792261

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mental illness? or mental awakeness

misdiagnosed.. ignored..

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/secrets-of-the-creative-brain/372299/

Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?

As I began interviewing my subjects, I soon realized that I would not be confirming my schizophrenia hypothesis. If I had paid more attention to Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, who both suffered from what we today call mood disorder, and less to James Joyce and Bertrand Russell, I might have foreseen this. One after another, my writer subjects came to my office and spent three or four hours pouring out the stories of their struggles with mood disorder—mostly depression, but occasionally bipolar disorder. A full 80 percent of them had had some kind of mood disturbance at some time in their lives, compared with just 30 percent of the control group—only slightly less than an age-matched group in the general population. (At first I had been surprised that nearly all the writers I approached would so eagerly agree to participate in a study with a young and unknown assistant professor—but I quickly came to understand why they were so interested in talking to a psychiatrist.)

I knew that such unconscious processes are an important component of creativity. For example, Neil Simon told me: “I don’t write consciously—it is as if the muse sits on my shoulder” and “I slip into a state that is apart from reality.” (Examples from history suggest the same thing. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once described how he composed an entire 300-line poem about Kubla Khan while in an opiate-induced, dreamlike state, and began writing it down when he awoke; he said he then lost most of it when he got interrupted and called away on an errand—thus the finished poem he published was but a fragment of what originally came to him in his dreamlike state.)

For years, I had been asking myself what might be special or unique about the brains of the workshop writers I had studied. In my own version of a eureka moment, the answer finally came to me: creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. To test this capacity, I needed to study the regions of the brain that go crazy when you let your thoughts wander.

Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.

In A Beautiful Mind, her biography of the mathematician John Nash, Sylvia Nasar describes a visit Nash received from a fellow mathematician while institutionalized at McLean Hospital. “How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical truth,” the colleague asked, “believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?” To which Nash replied: “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”

Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.

(One thing I’ve learned from this line of questioning is that creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work.)

Heston and I discussed whether some particularly creative people owe their gifts to a subclinical variant of schizophrenia that loosens their associative links sufficiently to enhance their creativity but not enough to make them mentally ill.

One possible contributory factor is a personality style shared by many of my creative subjects. These subjects are adventuresome and exploratory. They take risks. Particularly in science, the best work tends to occur in new frontiers. (As a popular saying among scientists goes: “When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.”) They have to confront doubt and rejection. And yet they have to persist in spite of that, because they believe strongly in the value of what they do. This can lead to psychic pain, which may manifest itself as depression or anxiety, or lead people to attempt to reduce their discomfort by turning to pain relievers such as alcohol.

I’ve been struck by how many of these people refer to their most creative ideas as “obvious.”

@jhagel mental illness..? or the manufactured way we respond to each other.. the spaces we've created for people to be..?

College Ready vs. Out-of-Basement Ready from @YongZhaoUO http://t.co/nfG8r5Ohzs

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/gcouros/status/485872624749133824

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spot on in many ways - but have to question - the living together ness...

why is that not good for us - as humans?

attachment. and authenticity.

Tech drives us 2 part time work @VentureBeat @digitalarun @jowyang @Kevindoylejones @peers @freelancersu @OuiShare http://t.co/fg6gKyYYOq

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/instigating/status/485901232133795840

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what if part time is the new full time...

Gordon Cook's report on the FLOK project in Ecuador http://t.co/WxzH5zc4tw

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/KevinCarson1/status/485996252824223746

http://guerrillatranslation.com/2013/07/01/unity-sans-convergence/

An additional, and major, problem is that convergence strategies aren’t effective at adapting to new situations that require unexpectedly different behaviours (that is to say, they’re not good at improvisation).

On the contrary, the brain lacks any sort of static, centralised structure. “Unity of mind” is constituted through instances of grand-scale synchronization, whereupon different neuronal areas act transiently in coordination. These instances of synchronization have a limited lifespan so the brain doesn’t get stuck in a specific sync-mode.

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We believe it’s only a matter time until society organizes to dismantle the electoral space. There are, in fact, various initiatives underway with this purpose in mind. We predict that only those who have understood the logic of distributed, networked processes of self-organisation and participation will succeed.